Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture

By María Fernández

Publication Year: 2014

Viewing four centuries of art and architecture anew through the lens of cosmopolitanism, this pathfinding book explores how Mexican visual culture presents an ongoing process of negotiation between the local and the global.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to the many individuals and institutions that supported me in
writing this book. I am grateful to Professor Shirley Samuels, chair of the
Department of the History of Art at Cornell University (2006–2012), for recognizing
the ripeness of this moment to publish this work. ...

Introduction

Cosmopolitanism in Mexican visual culture appears here in a series of case
studies taken in historical slices from the seventeenth century to the end of the
twentieth century. Cosmopolitanism is understood here as an evolving complex
of power relations with material, social, ideational, and affective manifestations,
which unite the local and the global, ...

On May 7, 1680, Charles II of Spain appointed Don Tomás Antonio de la Cerda
y Aragón, Conde de Paredes, Marqués de la Laguna, as the twenty-eighth viceroy
of New Spain. On September 7, after a three-month journey from Cadiz
passing through the Canary Islands and the Antilles, the new viceroy and his
entourage disembarked at the Port of Veracruz. ...

2. Castas, Monstrous Bodies, and Soft Buildings

It is no secret that traditional discourses of classical architecture are founded
on analogies to the human body. In the third volume of The Ten Books of
Architecture, the Roman architect Vitruvius established what would become
a permanent union between the proportions of the (male) body and classical
architecture. ...

3. Experiments in the Representationof National Identity: The Pavilion of Mexico in the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris a nd the Palacio de Bellas Artes

After independence in 1821, the Mexican elites’ previous identification with
Spain took the form of a general identification with Europe and later with the
United States. This resulted in imitation of European and U.S. cultural patterns.
Simultaneously, Mexico’s leaders continued to look at the most developed
indigenous civilizations, especially the Aztec Empire, ...

4. Of Ruins and Ghosts: The Social Functions of Pre-Hispanic Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Archaeological remains are more than traces of civilizations past. Like other
sites of nation-building they serve as stages for the contestation of multiple
interests. Official histories, tourist literature, art history, and archaeology
often obscure these tensions by focusing on the impressive materiality of the
monuments and on deciphering their original significance (Fig. 4.1). ...

Nineteenth-century Mexican architecture is widely recognized as eclectic.
Especially from about 1880 to the first decade of the twentieth century,
Mexican cities exhibited buildings of multiple stylistic tendencies, including
neoclassical, Baroque, neo-Gothic, and art nouveau, indicative of a cosmopolitan
consciousness. ...

6. Visualizing the Future: Estridentismo, Technology, and Art

In the twentieth century Mexico extended its reach toward modernity. Technologies
such as telephones, electric lighting, automobiles, cinema, and radio;
industrial materials such as glass, steel, and cement; modern building styles,
air travel, and television were disseminated to a wider proportion of society
than in the preceding century.1 ...

7. Re-creating the Past: Ignacio Marquina’s Reconstruction of the Templo Mayor de Tenochtitlan

The temple precinct of Tenochtitlan occupies a canonical status in the history
of Mexican art and culture. As depicted in the sixteenth-century Codex Mendoza
(Fig. 7.1) and described by numerous chroniclers, the site of the precinct
marks the center of the Aztec Empire and the foundation of the Mexica capital
in 1325. ...

8. Transnational Culture at the End of the Millennium: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s “Relational Architectures”

During the period of December 26, 1999, to January 7, 2000, from 6:00 P.M. to
6:00 A.M., Mexico’s City’s Zócalo was covered by an enormous canopy of light
rays, visible from a distance of 15 kilometers. The rays changed position every
six seconds, resulting in a new light design. ...

Conclusion

The studies in this book demonstrate that cosmopolitanism in Mexico was
closely linked to colonization. International learning and belief structures and
communication networks established in the colonial period were saturated
with indigenous forms of knowledge and expression. ...

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